A New Year's Fete Of Art, Not Alcohol

By JON NORDHEIMER

Published: December 26, 1990

FROM Boston to Calgary to Honolulu, more than a million Americans and Canadians are expected on New Year's Eve to ring out the traditional celebration of booze, noisemakers and hangovers and ring in Mozart, ballet performances and a wide selection of popular entertainment from rock 'n' roll to reggae to hula dancing.

Fifty-five cities in the United States and Canada will serve up performing arts and family entertainment as nonalcoholic alternatives to the carousing and midnight countdowns and fleets of intoxicated drivers who make the night one of the deadliest on American roads.

In some respects it is an extension of a new militancy against public and private drinking, drunken driving and hazardous holiday risk-taking like fireworks on the Fourth of July and trick-or-treating on Halloween.

But more than that, the multicultural events seek to accomplish what is not supposed to be possible in many cities: a drawing together of diverse crowds after dark in downtown areas, reaffirming a community spirit through the celebration of the arts.

The idea started 15 years ago in Boston, where the streets have filled on recent New Year's Eves with as many as 500,000 people. Encouraged by that's city's experience with peaceful, festive crowds, the idea began to spread in the 1980's to other communities.

"New Year's Eve is the safest night of the year in Boston," said Zeren Earls, director of First Night Boston, the nonprofit organizing force behind Boston's celebration and others elsewhere that are based on the Boston model.

This year First Night Boston will feature more than 1,000 artists performing at 41 indoor and 18 outdoor sites along a wide corridor in the heart of the city.

"People are in the best mood, walking the city streets with their children, taking in everything from inner-city rap groups to Handel and Haydn," Ms. Earls said.

Others derive a benefit about as rare in some metropolitan areas as chamber music in a fast-food outlet: a revived sense of community.

"When we started First Night Montclair three years ago, I was amazed by the sight of people discovering it was all right to talk with strangers on the streets of their town," said Gerald Fierst of Montclair, N.J., a community of 36,500 about 15 miles west of New York City. "In modern America we've lost many of our rituals and on New Year's Eve we're attempting to create one of a community at peace as we go into the future together," said Mr. Fierst, a professional storyteller who spins fables for children on New Year's Eve.

A Montclair neighbor, Lucretia Robinson, sees a combination of trends behind the enthusiasm, the anti-drunken-driving movement being just one of them.

"In the past parents were forced to decide between having 'a good time' or staying at home with their children and watching the Times Square ball go down at midnight on television," she said. "And the economy is forcing a change in attitude that excesses like two Porsches in every garage is a terrible value, and that the conviviality and closeness of family-centered and community activities are more meaningful."

In a city like New York, where homelessness, crime and other intractible urban ills have enshrined a streetwise dictum -- "never make eye contact with a stranger" -- into a daily way of life, opportunities to cross the barriers of silent alienation often seem available only to dog-walkers and those in movie lines.

Midtown Manhattan, with its theater, nightlife and other cultural offerings, is not like other cities in which downtown life ceases after 7 P.M. But the annual Times Square crush, with its accompanying drinking and rowdyism, is the essence of what the First Night movement hopes to offer as an alternative elsewhere, said Ms. Earls of First Night Boston. So far, no one has sought to establish something like it in New York, she said, but First Night has taken root in the region in Montclair, Hartford, Stamford, Conn., Albany and Buffalo.

"There's a hunger everywhere for this kind of expression, but people are at a loss at how to go about creating it," said Philip Slater, a writer and social critic in Santa Cruz, Calif.

Michael Lears, director of the American Studies Department at Rutgers University, said: "Coming out into the streets to celebrate together sounds like a very European way of doing things. Americans have spent so much time escaping from their community by locking themselves up at night with television sets and VCR's that we've created a global village but lost a local one."

The First Night movement, which added 20 cities in the past year alone, has been set in motion chiefly by nonpolitical groups. In most communities the effort was spearheaded by local arts councils, newspapers, civic-minded individuals or merchant associations. In Dayton, Ohio, it came to life under the auspices of the Alzheimer's Association.

"I liked the focus of shifting away from alcohol to the arts," said Merry Lee Corwin, the force behind First Night Honolulu, which is holding its inaugural effort Dec. 31 and is expected to draw 100,000 celebrants.